Trying to take off my shoe, I unadroitly pull the lace's knot to unloosenable tightness,
yanking me by a twisted skein to first lessons in tying bows -
and behind that I am reined back further yet, to be caught in pre-remembranced nets of crochet,
and to be bound by the pallid shackles of stiff-starched antimacassars,
having the light dragged out of them by the unyielding darkness of dismal aspidistras.

As a boy, I read of a viking sea-burial: those remaining
(until then locked to the whales' wayfarer by fealty's fetters, by gold-giving, by danger shared and by shared reward)
unloosed their links and cast off the longship with one dead eorl on board.
The boat-wood burnt slowly, then flame licks of Loki were billowed by a seaman's dream of a breeze,
until the blackened bones sank sizzling fiercely in the sunset - as if at some barbaric barbecue.

Like flick of fire, my wind-whirled life-line leaps to the incandescence of cognac-coated Christmas pudding -
the brandy basting shimmering blue with the glow of childhood hopes,
too soon betrayed, too soon sent bankrupt to the debtors' prison.
Riven from real rites, poor patches are torn from sharing's fabric, leaving shreds too short to clothe a soul.

Imaginary conversations with the ancestors fill my poor-box cranium, an annoying buzz -
like the rip-saw noise of fleet horse-flies, stinging, circling, settling, unsettling,
feeding on carrion dead or living,
too swift to swat, too alien or unevolved to empathise with,
while the reticulated filigree of my new simian cortex is defeated by the aeronautics of an insect intelligence
too constricted to be called a brain.
Such is the success of survival: of what changes, of what stays the same.

Seated cautiously at our last supper, we spar and shadow-box
like ex-lovers under blank flag of truce skirting round an unshared present tense.
Once the stalemate's struck, we scrabble hide-and-seek for the fairy-tale illusions of a once in-common past.
I avert my gaze from mottled wrinkling flaccid skin-folds hanging down like Victorian mourning-crepe;
I avoid the knowledge that once I was a furl inside you: now I'm not.

Hips swaying, belly bearing the weight of wine-lists past and of previous menus,
the heavy-breasted waitress doesn't offer me her dug to suck on.

I stand up to leave, unredeemed by the mouthing of bread and wine I've paid for.
The platter of decapitated fish brought me no salvation.
I taste the wormwood of my heathen forefather, the hobbled ugly blacksmith.
Wedding the sacred prostitute did not pay her price; welding the web that captured his cuckoldry
left his skin no less swart, left his leg no less lame, left his heart as hot and heavy as ever after's anvil,
left himself still snared in the warp and weft of a mesh more mighty than great gods.

I descend the black iron arabesques of the spiral stair-steps.
Below, as if beneath my boot-tread, I spy a mildly swelling bosom:
in vain I try to sight the impenetrable, the imploring gentle valley between two hillocks,
twin curled buds who don't yet know that they are mounds for making milk.

My demons do not rest;
deftly dragging me downwards, under downwards, my cleft-footed familiars demonstrate again I never pass the test.

notes:

lame smith: reference is to Hephaistos in Greek mythology, married to Aphrodite who was a Greek form of the great goddesses of love whose worship included ritual prostitution. Aphrodite was not monogamous; Hephaistos made a net in which he caught Aphrodite and Ares while they were having sex. The lameness/laming may have had ritual significance.

mesh more mighty: the three Fates or Moerae in Greek mythology span the thread of life on the orders of Moros (Destiny), who governed the fate of gods as well as mortals.

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